No more: It's getting an overhaul with the upcoming FreeBSD 8.0 release.

FreeBSD 8.0, due out next month, will include a new routing architecture that takes advantage of parallel processing capabilities. According to its developers, the update will provide FreeBSD 8.0 with a faster more advanced routing architecture than the legacy architecture.

It's an important change for FreeBSD, which has emerged as a key open source operating system for networking vendors, with players like Juniper, Coyote Point, Blue Coat and others offering their own network operating systems that are based on FreeBSD.

The new routing architecture was written Qing Li, senior architect at Blue Coat, as a way to give back to the open source community.

"Blue Coat's ProxySG networking kernel was partially derived from the FreeBSD kernel," Li told InternetNews.com. "Blue Coat is a sponsor of my open source development work, so this is a good way to contribute to the open source community."

Blue Coat's ProxySG is a WAN optimization device that relies on network intelligence to accelerate traffic.